Wednesday, 28 June 2017

Tuesday, 27 June 2017

The Maryland State Police Training Academy is in Sykesville, Maryland along with the Maryland Police and Correctional Training Commission. The academy is live-in and consists of twenty-six weeks of basic instruction.

Must submit proof of completion of 1200 hours of barber student training in a barber school or 2250 hours as a registered apprentice in a licensed barbershop and qualify by examination given by the Board.

Do the math: Assuming 40-hr weeks, that’s 30 weeks. More training for barbers than cops!

Even if President Trump manages to get his health reform through Congress, there is no guarantee it will survive the courts. Though the bill is still far from passage, the groundwork is already being laid to challenge its constitutionality. New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has pledged to challenge the reductions in funding for reproductive-health services. Other Democrats have challenged the constitutionality of the bill’s Medicaid provisions. Some have suggested that the “lapsed coverage” surcharge for the uninsured might be unconstitutional.

If this bill is enacted — and that is a big if — opponents will locate every conceivable basis to contest the law, so it will be held up in litigation, potentially, until after the next election. While no one can predict how the Supreme Court will act, President Trump and Congress can take steps to minimize that uncertainty, and ensure a smoother implementation. Specifically, they can take a page out of President Clinton’s failed health-care reform, and channel all litigation through a single three-judge panel, with a direct appeal to the Supreme Court. This approach would, as a Clinton-administration official noted two decades ago, bring “swift answers to the general constitutional challenges to the plan.”

Today, virtually all federal constitutional litigation begins before a single district-court judge, with an appeal to a three-judge panel. However, for much of the 20th century, Congress let litigants cut to the chase. Under the Three-Judge Court Act of 1910 and other contemporary bills, constitutional challenges would begin before a three-judge panel. As the practice developed, each panel would consist of two district-court judges and a single appeals-court judge. Within this framework, litigants would bypass any intermediate review, and there would be a mandatory review by the Supreme Court. In 1976, however, Congress severely curtailed their usage, retaining them only for challenges to apportionment maps.

SCOTUS reinstated the Trump travel ban but created an exception for those with a connection to a US entity. And there shall be no monkey business:

The facts of these cases illustrate the sort of relationship that qualifies. For individuals, a close familial relationship is required. A foreign national who wishes to enter the United States to live with or visit a family member, like Doe’s wife or Dr. Elshikh’s mother-in-law, clearly has such a relationship. As for entities, the relationship must be formal, documented, and formed in the ordinary course, rather than for the purpose of evading EO–2. The students from the designated countries who have been admitted to the University of Hawaii have such a relationship with an American entity. So too would a worker who accepted an offer of employment from an American company or a lecturer invited to address an American audience. Not so someone who enters into a relationship simply to avoid §2(c): For example, a nonprofit group devoted to immigration issues may not contact foreign nationals from the designated countries, add them to client lists, and then secure their entry by claiming injury from their exclusion.

Will there be a gusher of au pairs in burkas?

UPDATE: SCOTUS also acted broadly to protect the judiciary from itself. Jack Goldsmith:

But if the Court wanted to cover its bottom, it could have not ruled today on the petitions and not taken any stand on the injunctions or some of the lower court analysis. Instead, the Court took the case, commented on it, narrowed the lower court injunctions, and did so with substance and style that send a signal. I don’t think this signal tells us much if anything about what will happen on the merits. I also don’t believe it rules out examining the President’s actions very closely, even, perhaps, by denying him a normal presumption of regularity in light of his actions. The Court seems simply to be trying to turn down the temperature, and to interject a better model of behavior into our corroded institutions and discourteous civil discourse—or at least in courts. Thank you, Justices, if that is what you were doing, even in part.

A plane spotted over Charleston, WV had an aerial advertising banner reading “Sen. Heller: Keep Your Word And Vote No On Trumpcare.”

Small problem: Sen. Dean Heller is from Nevada (NV), not West Virginia (WV). It’s pretty unlikely that he, or any of his constituents, will see the plane.

Heller announced last week that he is opposed to the new healthcare bill, joining his colleagues Sens. Paul, Cruz, Lee, and Johnson in opposition. One of the members of the Senate who has not stated her opposition to the healthcare bill is Sen. Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV).

Done properly, this would have been seen by a few thousand people and perhaps covered on local news. “Foulup” made it a national story.

Remember the good laugh we all had when Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin ran into marital difficulties and it was recalled that horndog Bill Clinton officiated their wedding? This weekend the thrice-married Donald Trump attended, but Mike Pence officiated, the wedding of a Cabinet member.

In January 2016, Seattle’s minimum wage jumped from $11 an hour to $13 for large employers, the second big increase in less than a year. New research released Monday by a team of economists at the University of Washington suggests the wage hike may have come at a significant cost: The increase led to steep declines in employment for low-wage workers, and a drop in hours for those who kept their jobs. Crucially, the negative impact of lost jobs and hours more than offset the benefits of higher wages — on average, low-wage workers earned $125 per month less because of the higher wage, a small but significant decline.

The kicker:

The paper’s findings are preliminary and have not yet been subjected to peer review. And the authors stressed that even if their results hold up, their research leaves important questions unanswered, particularly about how the minimum wage has affected individual workers and businesses. The paper does not, for example, address whether displaced workers might have found jobs in other cities or with companies such as Uber that are not included in their data.

“Jobs in other cities.” So if we raise the minimum wage in every city nationwide ...

I noted a while back that Trump, like Obama before him, would sign any health care bill that could pass Congress and take full credit for it. Yuval Levin elaborates and adds some caveats:

The president has been an additional unpredictable political constraint—as the more coherent of his musings on health care have all suggested he is not comfortable with repealing and replacing the law, or at least is unfamiliar with the tradeoffs involved and unhappy when he learns about them. This probably had some effect on congressional Republican attitudes, at least early on. But another thing Republicans have learned in these six months is that Donald Trump is an exceptionally weak president, probably the weakest of their lifetimes, and he is likely to accept whatever they do. He’ll celebrate it, sitting himself front and center while they stand around him awkwardly. He’ll praise it wildly and inaccurately. And he’ll sign it—even if pretty soon thereafter, in the wake of bad press, he tries to distance himself from it on Twitter and calls them names.